Where Do Your Fingers Go?
by marginaliana
Summary: Sometimes, Jack sleeps.


1.

Alice watches Jack sleep. He's taking up the entirety of the settee, and she can't decide whether to wake him with a swift kick or sit in one of the slightly less comfortable chairs instead. The Rift has been shooting out weird things at a frantic pace for the past two weeks, and they've all been quite busy dealing with the results. So Alice is glad for these few hours of peace; if they continue, she and Emily will finally have a chance to catch up with Jack and their experiments.

He only seems to sleep when he hasn't been killed for a while, which is counterintuitive. Alice had hypothesized that he would sleep more after being dead, but the rush of life back into his body seems to make him refreshed and awake rather than tired (it makes him aroused, as well. Alice would be tempted to take advantage of that, if it weren't for Emily).

She can tell Jack is truly asleep because of the way his fingers move; when he's dead or merely resting his body is unnaturally still (Alice makes a note to ask Jack where he learned to hold himself that way). This time his hands, always at first folded neatly by his head, have crept down around his stomach. As she watches, Jack's face darkens, and his fingers tremble more wildly.

Exhaustion forgotten, Alice pulls up a nearby work stool. Jack is dreaming now, she realizes, his eyes moving rapidly behind their lids. His head turns back and forth, and an almost-soundless scream is wrenched from his mouth. "What dreams can frighten a man who cannot die?" she wonders as Jack's fingers clench like claws against his own skin. Jack has hinted at horror in his situation, though Alice cannot understand those feelings. He should be glad, should celebrate his gift. Should share it with them, instead of insisting he doesn't know how it was done. Still, perhaps, she imagines, he dreams of Torchwood (nightmare enough), dreams of living and dying each day all over again.

The nightmare passes, and Jack's face is peaceful again. His fingers now reveal nothing more than exhaustion, and Alice's interest in him wanes. Emily's dainty footstep sounds upon the stair, and Alice rises eagerly. Her mistress' sleep is always untroubled, and Alice knows she will have no difficulty finding rest in Emily's arms (they'll try cutting out Jack's heart tomorrow).

2.

Jack tells as many stories asleep as he does awake, Ianto thinks, but in sleep he doesn't lie. He starts with hands ritually folded at his head, the very image of control, but once he drops off, his hands twist and turn, spilling out tells that Ianto stores up for use against the cheerful poker face Jack shows during the day.

Ianto doesn't often get to watch Jack sleep; usually when Ianto wakes in the night Jack is reading a book or staring at the ceiling, murmuring litanies in a language Ianto can't quite understand. But sometimes Ianto wakes to Jack drooling on the pillow, his dreams evident in the shape of his arms as they curl across the coverlet. Ianto forces himself to stay awake, then, absorbing Jack's nocturnal, involuntary truths in contrast to the daytime yarns Jack loves to tell.

Jack's fingers pluck at the sheets; Ianto doesn't let himself remember the story about Jack playing guitar in some seedy bar, getting paid almost nothing but making up for it in tips because of his ready smile. Jack's hand grips a corner of the duvet; Ianto doesn't think about Jack racing against some tentacled species in the alien version of a souped-up Mustang.

No, these moments are more true somehow, even if he doesn't know what Jack is dreaming about (strangers, former lovers, sex in the SUV, cutting through jelly with a very sharp knife while being chased by a giant chicken). What is true is Jack's dangerous smile, Jack's furrowed brow, Jack's incongruously vulnerable expression when Ianto shifts out of his reach.

Sometimes Ianto wishes the Hub were better heated; the blankets always end up falling off the side of the bed, but Ianto enjoys himself far too much to risk waking Jack by tugging on them.

3.

Vigilance is Hame's watch-word; even when tending the Face of Boe was punishment it remained an honor. Mostly he sleeps now, only coming awake occasionally to ask the time and let her refresh the smoke in his tank. Before, she would have bet her whiskers that a sleeping patient couldn't hold her interest for long, but there's something about him that's different from anyone else she's known.

He is very old, and very wise, Hame knows that. And everyone has heard the stories of his children. But she wants to know more of him than just the histories, tries to piece together his secrets from the images that sometimes creep into her mind just before he wakes.

It is one such occasion when she finds he has not always been just a face. In sleep, his tendrils twitch, and Hame says "weeding the garden" before she can stop herself. The image comes through quite clearly – he is kneeling in the dusty soil, sleeves rolled up and dirt under his fingernails, smiling up at a beautiful humanoid woman with dark, curly hair. And then another flash of memory – he is standing at a gravesite, dropping a single white flower into the hole in the ground. "How many lives has he lived?" she wonders. "How many deaths has he witnessed?"

He doesn't tell her these things when he is awake, and she doesn't dare ask. Sometimes, though, when the sun is shining brightly he hums, snatches of songs half-forgotten or half-remembered. Sometimes, without speaking, she dances.

One day, after the Senate falls and they are alone, he catches her eye.

"Someone is coming," he says, pressing the words gently but firmly into her mind. "We will be free, one day."

It is easy to believe him.


End file.
